He’d long ago given up trying to retrace their route up the mountain, as directed by the son of a bitch Butch Roberson. Sollis hadn’t paid much attention to the trail they’d taken on the way up because he’d been concentrating on his footing, and it had been in daylight. Now, everything was jumbled and confusing. He told himself that if he kept walking down he’d eventually hit the bottom. It only made sense.

The trek had been pure torture. He was without any food—although there might be some in the backpack he couldn’t unshoulder or open—and his thirst was quenched only when he bumbled upon a small trickle of stream or creek.

Two hours before, he’d found a tiny ribbon of running creek and had dropped to his knees and plunged his face into it, only to find out in the dark there was less than an inch of water. He’d inhaled sand, twigs, and a floating beetle with the first gulp, and spit it out down his shirtfront. Aching of thirst, he’d pushed his way upstream through thorny brush until he located what looked like a wide and deep natural cistern bordered by rocks. Again, he dropped to his knees in the brush and lowered his head halfway between two white and spindly tree roots and drank deeply. The water was cold and cut its way down his throat and chilled him to the bone. But he kept drinking, ignoring the metallic taste.

When he was sated, he sat back and wiped his mouth dry. He could feel the hydration seep through his guts, and spread out to his extremities. Sollis couldn’t remember how long a human could survive without food and water, but he knew it wasn’t long without water. So he knew he’d staved off an ugly death.

Then he realized he was sitting back on something large and spongy, something that had some give to it. Something that smelled putrid. He turned and looked into the naked eyehole of a dead mule deer. He was sitting on its body, and the two long white roots he’d drunk between were its decomposing legs.

That was the first time he cried.

—

HE’D BEEN TWENTY YEARS OLD when he first heard about the sport of long-distance shooting. Until that time, it seemed he’d spent his life under the shadow of his muscle-bound older brother Trent, who had landed a job as a deputy under Sheriff McLanahan in the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department. Oh, how their parents loved Trent, who played high school football and basketball and lifted weights (and shot human growth hormone into himself) all through college until he emerged double the size he went in. Sollis, meanwhile, ran with a pack of losers and was frequently in trouble. The joke in the Sollis house—which Sollis never found funny—was that someday Trent would arrest Sollis.

Ha-ha, Sollis thought bitterly, although he admitted to himself it might have happened if Trent hadn’t been killed in the line of duty the year before. He didn’t miss his brother at all.

Jimmy Sollis had been on a crew of roofers who followed hailstorms around the state and into Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, when he first heard about long-distance shooting from the foreman. They’d been sitting on the peak of a roof eating their lunches in Lovell, Wyoming. The foreman said he still competed around the country, using high-end custom rifles to hit targets hundreds of yards away. Sollis got excited about the idea of it, and the foreman showed Sollis some of his rifles and agreed to take him to an event outside of Rock Springs.

Sollis was enthralled. He’d never been much of an athlete or a scholar, but something about propelling a small cylinder of polished heavy metal through the air to hit a target got him excited inside. It got him hard.

He learned about calculating windage, elevation, altitude, velocity, determining grains of gunpowder, learning how to breathe . . .

At the events he attended with his foreman, Sollis collected business cards from custom gunmakers who had booths set up, and started saving chunks of his paycheck—and supplementing his income by dealing meth to roughnecks on the side. His first long-distance rifle, a Sako TRG-42 chambered for .338, won him $2,500 at the Orem, Utah, Invitational—and he was off. He’d reinvest his winnings into more precision rifles, because a man could never have enough rifles. He sent the rifles away to custom gunsmiths who tweaked the weight of the trigger pull and equipped the weapons with specialized scope rings and high-tech optics. Sollis found he had a natural ability to calculate velocity, drop, and windage. He could hit what he aimed at.

But he wanted more. Sollis had listened to a couple of books on tape written by Marine snipers, and he desperately wanted to use his newfound skill on Iraqis, Iranians, or Afghanis. He had no strong feelings about which. So he signed up for the U.S. Marines, telling the recruiter in the White Mountain Mall in Rock Springs they were getting a blue-chip player, that they didn’t realize the LeBron of snipers was standing right in front of them, actually volunteering to join their playground pickup team.

The Marines rejected him because of his rap sheet of drug-related arrests, and because of that sexual assault charge with the underage cheerleader back in high school. Furious, he tried the Army, then the Navy. But the word was out among the recruiters and he was black-balled. The foreman told Sollis about private defense contractors who might be able to use his skill, and Sollis was interested. Anything was better than roofing for a living.

So when ex-Sheriff McLanahan drove up that morning before dawn as Sollis crossed from his rental house to his pickup to go to work and offered him a chance to go with him, Jimmy Sollis jumped at it. The opportunity to use his skills for the good of humanity and on the right side of the law? He was all over that.

He had no idea that it would result in a gut-shot hunter from Maine, or a desperate hike down a mountain in the middle of the night. And all because McLanahan hadn’t warned him off before he pulled the trigger on the wrong man.

It burned Sollis how McLanahan had acted once that son of a bitch Roberson had shown up. Suddenly, it was all Sollis, as if McLanahan hadn’t recruited him and given him the signal to fire.

It just wasn’t right.

—

TO MAKE matters worse, that phone Roberson had hidden in his daypack kept ringing and he couldn’t even answer it. He thought:

He’d had his nine-thousand-dollar rifle taken away from him;

He was lost;

If he somehow made his way back to Saddlestring, he’d likely be arrested for gut-shooting a hunter from Maine;

His belly was filled with rotten dead deer seepage;

Mosquitoes were feeding on the back of his neck where he couldn’t reach;

His cheek ached from the bullet that had creased it;

And . . .

Nobody loved him.

And now he couldn’t even answer the goddamned phone.

—

JIMMY SOLLIS PAUSED near the middle of a small clearing in the trees. He realized the hairs on the back of his neck and his forearms had pricked up because he’d seen, heard, or sensed something that was off. He stood still until his breathing returned to normal from the exertion of the trek through a long jumble of down trees and branches.

When he could hear again over the rhythmic pounding of his own heart, he slowly turned his head to the right, then the left. He wondered what it was that had made him stop, made the hairs prick up. Sollis had a creepy thought that someone might be watching him.

The terrain had leveled somewhat after an hour of clawing his way over and through the timber on a steep slope. The moon, straight overhead, lit up the grassy meadow in a shade of light blue. The wall of trees on all four sides of the clearing was dark and impenetrable by the light, though, which made him think that whatever or whoever was watching him hung back in the shadows.